Bell's class visits Old Order Mennonite Farm
Chris Rutledge
Issue date: 10/27/08 Section: News
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Geography class to Scottsville,
Ky. to visit an Old Order Mennonite
farm. The trip is a yearly activity
for the class.
"I've been working here ten years
and I've only missed a couple," mentioned
Bell.
The class got together and arranged
a date and carpooling earlier in the semester.
"I try to encourage people to carpool,"
said Bell. "I took six students
plus myself in my van."
"Professor Bell is the kind of teacher
that wants his students to learn not
only by sitting in a classroom but by
ge??ing into the field and experiencing
a cultural landscape firsthand,"
said Amber Bond, one of his students.
"Changing atmospheres, I think, really
stimulates the brain. The trip to the Old
Order Mennonite farm tied into our
study of cultural geography so seamlessly,
it was truly inspiring."
"Popular culture is pretty easy to
experience," said Bell. "I wanted them
to see a different culture that was still
here among them."
In past visits, the class has seen everything
from ritual cow carvings to
funerals.
"One year we went up and couldn't
find anyone in the community. It was
like they were gone. And then we went
to one of their stores and realized that
there had been a death in the community,
so we witnessed that," said Bell.
"We saw the whole funeral procession;
all of these horse drawn carriages and
everyone dressed in black for the man
who had died the night before. It was
very humbling and interesting to see."
One visit, students even bared witness
to a live sheep processing.
"When the Kurdish Middle Eastern
immigrants will come up from immigrants
and purchase sheep from them,
they will process the sheep right there,"
explained Bell. "What that means is
they pull out a knife and you hear this
sheep going 'baaah' and they take the
knife and cut their head off right there.
That was a big culture stock for the students
to see."
This year the students didn't see
anything quite that extreme, however
it was a significant change from what
they were used to.
"As soon as we arrived at the farm,
we experienced a family in the process
of making apple butter Miller's Jam
House. They were canning and preparing
it to be sold in stores and by
mail-order," said Bond. "We watched
the men work so hard extracting the
sorghum from the stalk. Some of the
men were not men, but young boys
who were working just as hard as the
older ones. Since they use no electricity
everything was driven by horse
power."
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